chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas and orangutans definitely deserve some amount of (human) rights and protection, more so than many other animals, but full personhood is a bit of a no.


i worked at a slaughterhouse for a period of time. not as a slaughterer though
i think that there's a bit of a problem with industrialised food production. it serves to alienate us from food as something absolutely vital for our well-beings and existence, capitalising it has alienated us from all the implications that living in the world ought to have for our beings.
if food production is the production of objects for sale rather than something directly linked to our beings as persons or our ways of life it becomes all the easier to reduce some parts of the world into famine while bloating the other part.


this line of thinking is why i've got a huge problem with the morality of abortion (all members of the species Homo Sapiens should be protected)

This post was edited by Gastly on Oct 14 2014 01:13pm

Yes perhaps, I need to read some more Kant.

Ironically, if food production was not done in a capitalistic way, much more of the world would go hungry.

Leave it capitalist, just make mass animal Holocaust illegal.

Liberals, simultaneously solving world hunger and stifling food production.

what would happen if i gave the feudal peasants of old the means of modern technology? could capitalism have controlled the weather to prevent droughts or frost?


it's not that simple, and i'll give you a hint to why it is not.
animals need to eat, and much of the terrain that can sustain farming is used for farming in order to feed the produce to animals that are to be eaten.
and animals aren't very good at using energy (esp. pigs)

some terrain can be used to sustain animals rather than crops, but currently the situation is far from that.

This post was edited by Gastly on Oct 14 2014 12:57pm

if the vegetarian propaganda i've been fed is accurate, we could in fact solve world hunger by stifling meat production ~ and reusing the resources that went towards meat production for vegetarian ends

This post was edited by duffman316 on Oct 14 2014 12:57pm

I think you are aware that food production is not the limiting factor in worldwide malnutrition, but it's the logistics of food transportation.

Plus there's the simple fact that plants are outrageously more energy efficient to eat than animals, so if all meat production stopped and only ~10% of the meat production resources went into plant production instead, we'd have about the same amount of food.



Well we wouldn't solve world hunger because not having enough food isn't the issue, but the so-called propaganda is correct that we'd have a far greater food surplus if we switched meat production to plant production.

This post was edited by Voyaging on Oct 14 2014 01:03pm

to quote what shoved to/showed me the idea of alienation from food as vital to us
"Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."
- Martin Heidegger

think of how the hunter-gatherer or the farmer felt of their food and how fundamentally they were "connected" to it, or how it was a part of their "beings". i think that it's something vital that we lack.

This post was edited by Gastly on Oct 14 2014 01:25pm

Animals deserve the right to live and exist and to be happy. The same rights as people - no.
And ill give you an example - You live in a village in Africa and are terrorized by a pack of Lions , would you be right to grab a gun and kill those Lions? No - you have a responsibility to do everything you can to catch them and relocate them and consider every other option first.

So do we have a right to slaughter animals for meat? - well those animals must be allowed a sense of freedom and the ability to have a sense of Life
and when/if we slaughter them - we probably need to approach it quite differently than we do - - consider Temple Grandin's thoughts, and the Native Americans, and Halal meat, and Shechita traditions where The animal must be killed "with respect and compassion".

This post was edited by card_sultan on Oct 14 2014 01:37pm